The Hundred is coming

The Hundred tournament features eight teams, representing seven cities from around the UK, these will be played from 17 July-16 August 2019.

Matches feature 100 balls bowled in blocks of five or 10, cities will field both male and female teams. Many feel it’s a threat to the game following on from T20 a move towards American style sports designed to suit a TV audience especially after the recent “draft”. This has been denied by ECB Chairman Colin Graves who said “We are changing cricket, you get resistance because nobody likes change. I played cricket for 40 years in Yorkshire and I understand where they are coming from, but the game has got to move on.

“Everything we have done has been in consultation with our members and counties. We have 80,000 members who have been talked to. Nothing has been imposed. They could have voted it down – they didn’t.”

One big positive coming out of this is that 10 men’s games and 8 women’s games will be shown on free to air TV. This should be really helpful in attracting young players to cricket. If this is a success will we start to see variants of the Hundred introduced into Amateur cricket at least at younger age groups and to attract more female participants to cricket. It will also be shown over the school holiday period to give plenty of options to watch.

Many will be cynical toward change but its clear from the fall in numbers of local cricket teams some changes are needed to inspire future generations into the sport.

The teams that make up the new league are as follows:

Birmingham Phoenix

London Spirit

Manchester Originals

Northern Superchargers

Oval Invincibles

Southern Brave

Trent Rockets

Welsh Fire (Tân Cymreig)

The tournament will run over a 38-day period between mid-July 2020 and early-September 2020.

There will be 32 games played in the regular season, with each team playing four games at home and four games away, before play-off rounds to determine the champions.